Football Manager 2013 was pirated over 10.1 million times, once in the Vatican

Sports Interactive studio head Miles Jacobson revealed that Football Manager 2013 was illegally downloaded over 10.1 million times in a talk at the London Games Conference, MCVUK reported. He explained that the cracked software featured a "Home" flaw, which let the developer track the IP addresses of all pirates. Among the regions Jacobson discovered the illegal downloads in, China led the group with 3.2 million downloads followed by Turkey with 1.05 million copies of the game. Jacobson added that one person in the 547,000 that illegally downloaded Football Manager 2013 in Italy was located in Vatican City.

While the developer said it would "be ridiculous to think" that every illegal download equated to one lost sale of the game, he estimated that 176,000 sales were lost to pirating, and that 1.74 percent of downloaders would have potentially purchased Football Manager 2013 had the cracking software not been available. Putting it in tangible terms, Jacobson equated the lost sales to $3.7 million in revenue that Sports Interactive and publisher Sega won't see.

Jacobson was previously optimistic in November 2012 about the new anti-piracy measures placed in the game, noting that Football Manager 2012 wasn't pirated until two weeks after release. By comparison, Football Manager 2013 went 119 days without being cracked, the official LGC Twitter account noted during Jacobson's talk.